How I Got to Retro PC’s

Thinking way back to that time period, I had just returned to the United States after having lived in Italy for 6 years. In Italy I was all commodore for the most part. The only real PC that I can reference is the the IBM Bridge Board in my Amiga 2000. Many of the SYSOP Friends I had from FIDO NET were all PC. I did have one Macintosh friend. Long story short, upon returning to the US I was down to a single Amiga 1200 Computer. The US scene just wasn’t nearly as robust for the Amiga as Europe was at the time.

While we did do some commercial Desktop Publishing work for a Marketing person on the side with the Amiga and Pagestream, that era slowly faded out and eventually I Built a 486 PC. One of the jobs I had early upon returning was at a PC Parts and System wholesaler. Naturally I just bought my own parts and built the 486. I think it may have been a Soyo MB, 486 SX and cheap OEM Sound and Video. This was the early 90’s if I recall, like 1993-1994 or there abouts. I was predominately PC there forward with a Dabbling of Mac a few times along the way.

Fast forward!

I really like to stay technical despite being an executive level IT Management and Cybersecurity Professional these days. My hobbies keep my mind alert and working and provide an escape. Computing has always been a thing for me, I have built so many PC’s for myself and a few others over the years that I cant count them all. Today I have 2 really nice AMD based server level systems you will see in this picture of my Ham Radio Station at its height!

The one on the bottom right is my Ryzen 7960, 128GB RAM, RTX 4090 System and the one on the left is my smaller 5950, 64GB RAM and RTX 3080 TI. That all was a 10 Year fun ride as there were many PC’s and Radios during that time period.

Now as you can see on the PC Old and New Page I have purchased up a number of retro PC’s and Parts. The goal being two retro systems in the end, a super 486 sound and DOS/Win 3.11 Game machine and then a Retro Windows XP Machine. I have been at these for a few months now and finally getting to where I will cover a few and together I will share my ride to which two I choose to fill my needs.

I hope you enjoy, I do enjoy sharing this as well as log what it is I am doing and why I made the decisions I did.

Stay tuned!

E